London Design Festival, V&A, London 2014
This installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London commissioned as part of the London Design Festival, creates a geometric floor pattern out of cork based on a randomised interpretation of cork’s molecular structure. The pattern has a trompe l’oeil quality which conjures an undulating landscape much like a mountain range when viewed from an aeroplane. This is revealed to viewers as they walk over the pattern. The work creates an experience that oscillates between microscopic and geographic scales. It was made in collaboration with the Portuguese cork manufacturer, Amorim.
Kunstforening, Tromsø, Norway 2016.
Silver birch tree trunks, cut down for firewood, create a new hanging forest of around 100 trees, through which the forest and mountain opposite the gallery can be viewed.
On the gallery floor a parallel series of repeating straight lines, placed approximately 30cm apart, is created from gravel. In contrast, the trees are hung randomly, their positions like dots on a musical stave.
Visitors passing through the gallery are forced to interact with the hanging trees, which move in response to their passage through them. The movements of the visitor are also distorted by the act of carefully negotiating the gravel lines on the floor in order to avoid disturbing them.
When they are accidently (or deliberately?) disturbed, the viewer destroys the apparent perfection of the lines and contributes to the changing nature of the work, by leaving traces of their own movement.
RoomArtSpace, London, 2015.
“My Dreams of Levitation” is a framed ‘ghost’ room made up of skirting boards and architraves which mimic those of the existing rooms in the Georgian house in which it is sited. The structure is elevated and shifted in relation to the existing rooms, interrupting their spatial flow and forcing visitors into awkward encounters with the existing architecture. The piece creates a series of subsidiary spaces, which undermine the formal coherence of the Georgian proportions.
The elements, which make up the intervention, can be read as discrete sculptural objects or as a copy of the existing rooms. The piece explores the nature of the horizontal and vertical architectural boundaries, and openings, that determine normative proportions, functionality, levels of human interaction and the ownership of architectural space.
The title of the work refers to both the dream-like quality of the space created and to the fact that it is elevated in relation to the existing rooms.
Ambika P3, London.
53:10 is a random hanging of 53 doorframes, visually multiplied in 10 wall-mounted mirrors.
The doorframes form a meshwork of ever narrowing and widening passageways, leading only to further encounters with other doorframes. They create thresholds into spaces where the viewer never arrives. As the frames are loosely hung, the inevitable physical encounters between viewer and frame causes movement and noise. Viewers are free to move through space along any route and in any direction. It is a nomadic, ‘smooth space’, that articulates a strange kind of architectural arrangement consisting of thresholds and becomings but with no definable boundaries or sense of enclosure.
The title suggests a piece of contemporary music and is inspired by the ideas of John Cage whose chance operation technique also determined the siting of each door frame, creating the resultant random arrangement. The work can be read as a kind of musical instrument, which is “played” by the visitor as he or she moves through it.
Bologna – Proposal for a Public Artwork.
The primary element in this proposal for a Holocaust Memorial in Bologna is the domestic doorway. The door is perhaps the most anthropomorphic of architectural elements. It might also be seen as being symbolic of the human body – a link between the body and the city.
Doors are also thresholds – a point of passage from one state to another and a metaphor for the passages of life’s stages. The proposed memorial, made of door frames, represents simultaneously the human individual, the city and the passage through life.
On ascending the steps from the street towards the raised piazza, the visitor is confronted by set of fixed, differently sized doorways, arranged asymmetrically in rows and pushing outfrom the opening between the two existing monumental walls.
The random angles and proximity of these frames create a labyrinthine route, whereby one door leads only to another door creating a sense of disorientation. Rooms are absences.
In another way, the Memorial recalls ruins or ancients monuments.
Public Work, South Bank Centre, London 2014
Sliding Gate represents the concept of Storge or familial love, alongside a number of other installations by leading artists and designers, forming part of the SBC’s Festival of Love.
It consists of two structures - a gateway at Hungerford Bridge and a spire on Mandela Walk - which incorporate playground slides and supporting large text pieces formed in shimmer discs. The structures are monumental, but playful in character.
The installation responds to the concept of Storge by encouraging an enjoyable activity that can be shared by family members together – a monument and a play structure.
The piece therefore enters into the spirit of the Festival of Love in its totality, and of the celebrated moments of family life in particular.
Public Work, Lyme Park, Cheshire, 2015
Distant Drum Beat is an interactive lighting installation that creates a contemporary interpretation of the 18th Century Landscape at the National Trust property, Lyme Park in Cheshire.
An electronic drum kit is sited on the lawn. It is aligned with an existing formal, line of sight which runs between the lawn and a folly called the Lantern, situated on a hill side 1 Km in the distance. This axial relationship, originally arranged for the pleasure of the landowner reinforces a relationship between vision and private property.
In Distant Drum Beat, visitors are invited to play the drums. Drumming activates a series of lights placed within the windows of the lantern, which move and change colour. Rather than a passive viewer, the drummer becomes an active participant in the line of sight relationship in a manner that engages the senses of sound, touch and vision.
Pavilion, Milton Keynes, 2017.
Citizen Ship is a collaboration between Modern Architect and the Freee Art Collective. Freee makes artworks based on public protest and this pavilion is designed to house public workshops on how to create political slogans. Conceived as a pair of over-scaled bus shelters and mounted on a stepped plinth, the pavilion provides several sites for the display of political slogans, including the steps of the plinth, the glass walls of structure and a moving LED sign that unifies the two parts of the structure. The pavilion changes over time as new texts are added.
The structure was commissioned by Milton Keynes City Club as part of the city’s 50th birthday celebrations.
Wall Painting, Folkestone 2017.
Levitation I is commissioned by Hop Projects, a gallery and project space in Tontine Street, Folkestone. A large open framed cube is painted in axonometric projection onto the front elevation of the gallery, apparently floating as a three-dimensional object above the street. Its cubic form appears arbitrary at first sight, but closer inspection reveals a complex interconnection with the four windows of the existing façade. Levitation is one of a series of works that explore the relationship between three-dimensional space and its representation.